Until a couple of months ago, Outlook was speedy, even with my 25,000 Outlook contacts. When I'd double-click on the email I didn't yet have an Outlook contact file made for, the contact card would pop up, I'd hit Add then Save, then the View Source link would immediately appear in the contact card so that I could click on that then modify the root Outlook contact file as necessary. Now it's a 50/50 chance that the View Source link won't appear until I restart Outlook. Searching an email in my Contacts screen would be a couple of seconds tops before I'd get a result. Now it's again, 50/50 chance of it just searching and searching until I restart and try again. This situation is adding hours to my workdays. I uninstalled Outlook, deleted all profiles and reinstalled. I also spent a lot of time making sure Indexing Options was properly modified to search all Office-related folders. I also deleted and rebuilt the index. Still the same issue. What gives?

Here the View source link wasn't "immediately" but it came up after a couple of seconds. if yours was immediate, I'm jealous. I added a registry key to open a contact form instead of the card to save the step of clicking the link to open it.

Yes, there has been a couple of updates recently and the problems all started around then.
I just tried to add that registry key but it does not seem to have worked. Can you take a look at this snapshot and let me know if I did it right? I modified both DWORDs to value 1. The instructions say to look in folder 16.0 for common/contactcard but I couldn't find it in there. It was in 15.0 instead.

Attachments

it looks right. Did you restart Outlook? Oh... you have Outlook 2016, so you need it under 16.0 - if the folder doesn't exist create it.

The reg file on that page will create the keys. It puts it under policies path, but you can edit it in notepad to remove 'policies/' if you want it in the user path - either one works for all users (the polices path is the one set by group polices. )